by Sarah Bruni
The following night they used Sheila’s new ID in the hotel bar. The bartender didn’t look at her name oddly, as she expected he would. He glanced at it through the plastic sleeve of her wallet and said, “What are you having?”
“Vodka tonic,” said Sheila cautiously.
Peter ordered a beer and they found a table in the corner. He announced that they were going to run out of money, which Sheila had already figured. They had only been there for three days, but living exclusively on the stolen money wasn’t a sustainable plan. Sheila understood if it ever came down to an emergency, she had money saved in her bank, the money she had been saving for France. But she didn’t want to touch that. She didn’t want her bank tracing her location after a transaction; besides, that money had nothing to do with this.
“If you want to stay here, we’ll have to start looking for new jobs,” he said. “Do you want to stay in Chicago?”
She thought she did. She knew she wanted to be where he was. But what she had been craving was a plan, a ready-made plan that she could latch onto and live inside of, and the more time she spent with Peter, the clearer it became that there didn’t seem to be any semblance of a plan at all. Aside from the river cruise, she hadn’t seen more than two blocks in either direction of their hotel. She was giving her father an ulcer.
“Who are the men whose IDs you have in your wallet?” she asked.
Peter nodded, as if confirming the question was a fair one. He said, “They’re brothers.”
“Are they real, or made up?”
“No, they’re real.”
“Who are they?”
“Me and my dead brother,” he said. “Jake.”
“I didn’t mean … um,” she trailed off. “Sorry.”
“Well, what for? He died years ago.”
“You miss him?”
“He was much older than me. He died when I was a kid and left me all his comic books.”
“Well, then which one are you?” asked Sheila.
“If I had to pick one, I guess I’d be the original,” Peter said. He was smiling that goofy, half-crazed smile he sometimes had. “Lee and Ditko’s, back when the mechanical web-shooters were designed by hand. None of this bullshit inflation with organic spinnerets—I’m just not interested in that.”
Sheila stared. Two thoughts came to her at once, quickly, and settled uncomfortably in her chest. The first was that the supposedly hard and fast rules by which the regular world functioned were actually blurry, irregular, like the borders between state lines, how it was difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when one territory became another if you weren’t on the strip of the Interstate that marked the transition with a welcome sign. That the logic she had thought governed the world of adults was a hazy thing, no more certain than the lies they told to children. But the second thought came just as quickly: anyone could play this game. Sheila narrowed her eyes. “I mean, which brother are you?”
“The younger one,” he said. “The baby.”
“What’s your real name?”
“What’s the difference?”
“But Peter isn’t your real name.”
He looked at her hard. “Nobody reads comic books anymore,” he said. “So it might as well be.”
Sheila looked Peter in the eye and reached out across the table. She gripped his chin between her two fingers, and held him there. She dropped her voice and spoke low. “Lots of people read comic books still,” said Sheila. She knew this to be true, and she would stand by it. There were readers everywhere; there were movies being made all the time. What right did Peter have to single-handedly commandeer the story? He wasn’t doing it without her input. She tightened her grip on his face, held it still, and his mouth—half-opened as if in reply—sat mute by her hand, waiting.
Sheila let go of his face and put her hand back around the glass of ice that held her drink. She tipped back the glass and felt the last of the vodka coat the inside of her mouth. She placed the glass down on the table, and allowed her eyes to meet Peter’s. At first he just stared. He ran his own hand over his chin, as if tracing the impression she had left. “Okay, sweetheart,” he said softly, “you’re right. Lots of people read them.” But still he didn’t look away, and she didn’t look away, and in that lapse something shifted, as if the empty space between them were growing angles, edges, something sharp enough to reach out and grab and form into what you wanted.
“New rule, starting now,” said Sheila, and Peter nodded. “No more calling me kid, no more sweetheart, no more Sheila. You call me my name as it’s printed on my ID, and I’ll do the same for you. Deal?”
He looked at her uneasily for a second. “Okay,” he said.
“Say it,” she said.
“I said we have a deal,” he said.
She shook her head. “I want to hear you say my name.”
“Gwen,” he said. “We have a deal.”
Sheila smiled. Under the table, she slipped her hand onto his knee.
His friend in Humboldt Park had said that they could crash in the loft for a few weeks, no more than that, or they’d need them to help make rent. Technically, she and Peter were fugitives. Sheila knew this, of course. But they had started to depend on each other. It was thrilling, and in a way, everything changed when they were in the apartment together. She felt less like a runaway and more like his girlfriend. She had never been anyone’s girlfriend. Peter draped his arm over her shoulders as they walked down the street together, like he wanted to protect her, to be on both sides of her at once. But he was helpless too. Sleeping beside her, he would call her name and ask her for things, and it made her feel powerful, so she understood that he wanted her to protect him as well. This was part of the deal.
Sheila met a pretty Czech girl named Iva who lived downstairs and had also recently left her home. She cleaned houses with a group of women, all from different places. Iva came upstairs to introduce herself one of the first nights, and Sheila took to her right away. Iva was a somewhat recent immigrant to Chicago, with a passable—but far from perfect—command of the English language, and Sheila instantly saw an ally in her. She went and knocked on Iva’s door the following night, when Peter wasn’t around, and asked her for a job.
Iva looked at her carefully. “You want to clean houses?” She seemed incredulous at first. “The work is hard. Floors we clean on our knees, you understand this.”
“I get it,” Sheila said. “I know how to clean.”
“The bathroom in your apartment,” Iva said. “I saw it yesterday. It is not so clean.”
“We just moved in,” Sheila assured her. “I haven’t had the chance.”
Iva stared at her for another second, then disappeared into her own bathroom. She came back with a bottle of bleach and a sponge. “We try it?” she asked. “A test.”
Sheila took the bottle of bleach and the sponge from Iva, and before both women walked up the narrow stairs to Sheila’s apartment, Iva opened her fridge and grabbed two bottles of beer to take upstairs with them.
Iva opened one beer and looked in Sheila’s cabinets for a glass, but there weren’t any there. She looked confused for a second but let it go without saying anything. Then Iva took a sip from the long neck of her beer bottle, licked her lips, and sat on the closed lid of the toilet while Sheila got on her hands and knees and did her best with the bleach and the sponge in one of the blackened corners. Iva opened the second beer and smiled as she set it on the edge of the bathtub for Sheila.
“You are too young for him,” Iva said.
Sheila, scrubbing at the tiles, felt her face get hot. She looked up at Iva. “I’m not as young as I look,” she said. But she could feel the color in her face and was sure that just then she looked even younger.
Iva smiled. “He knows how many years you have?”
Sheila nodded. She pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She continued scrubbing.
“How many?”
She had been ready to say twenty-one, but as she turned a
nd sat on the tub to take a sip from the beer that Iva had offered her, she felt here was an opportunity to speak the truth and see how it sounded. The possibility was liberating. It was the same with her name. After demanding that Peter call her Gwen, she had introduced herself as Sheila to Iva without thinking twice. It felt good to be able to control this, to exercise authority over when she was one thing, and when she was another. “Seventeen,” Sheila said. “I’ll be eighteen next week.”
Sheila was afraid that Iva would reprimand her, the way her sister might have, but she could see right away that she would be rewarded for her honesty. Iva nodded. “He has a nice face, your boyfriend,” she said. “But he looks very sad, I think.”
It was the first time anyone had referred to Peter this way, and Sheila felt her heart knock things around in her chest. “He is too sad,” Sheila agreed. “I’m going to work on that.”
“Yes,” Iva said. “I imagine you will have success.” She reached out and touched the ends of Sheila’s hair that hovered near the tile floor while she scrubbed. “Very pretty,” Iva said, “but you will need to tie it back to work.” Iva took a black rubber band from her own wrist and offered it to Sheila.
Sheila nodded; obediently she fastened the band into her hair.
“I pay in cash,” Iva said finally. “The women whose houses we clean will leave the payment in cash, and we share it.”
“That works for me,” Sheila said.
Iva smiled a little then in the corner of her mouth like of course she knew it worked, or she wouldn’t have mentioned it. Her smile remained couched in the corner of her mouth as if to say, I know you have something to hide, but you’re not alone in this.
Sheila started cleaning houses. No one talked to each other much except when articulating the full name of a cleaning product. “Clorox Bleach?” someone would shout from the bathroom down the stairs. “Murphy’s Oil Soap!” the girl in the kitchen would respond, and the two would meet halfway up the stairs and make the exchange. The houses they cleaned had many bathrooms on each floor. “A waste!” Sheila heard one woman say, as she moved between bathrooms with a sponge. Sheila had never thought of the two bathrooms in her parents’ house as excessive; there was one on each floor. Now she could see how little one needed to survive.
It didn’t take long to discover that Iva spoke French as well as English, and so sometimes Sheila would speak with her in her own stunted French. “What age do you have?” they asked each other over and over again, and each time Sheila answered honestly, it felt just as good as it had the first time. “How does Chicago please you?” The way that Iva said the name of their city, Chicago sounded like the most exotic place in the world. But of course, that was a trick of the tongue; that was the French, making every word in Sheila’s life sound like a huge soiree with lace tablecloths and pointy shoes, while her hands were wringing out a dirty sponge in some rich woman’s bathtub.
Peter had taken a job in a family restaurant, washing dishes. He was getting paid under the table, and often returned with a small roll of bills to sort. His arms were always pink when he came home, from all that hot water. The hairs on his arm were matted in every direction.
“You look like a haystack,” Sheila said to him, petting his arm.
“So do you,” said Peter. He didn’t take his eyes off hers, as if there were a whole mess of hay in her eyes, a maze or something.
There was a balding preacher on a post at the street corner near her home in Iowa who would yell at passersby on Saturday mornings about hay and eyes. “It’s easier to pass through the eye of a needle, than to find a needle in a haystack.” Or, “Look how you see a fleck of dust in your neighbor’s eye but not a haystack in your own.” Or something like that.
Sheila looked from Peter’s eyes to his arm and back again.
“Parker, you’re insane,” she said. She smiled and drew her hands around his neck, pulled him into her. “I’m sorry to say, you don’t make a bit of sense.”
“Of course it makes sense. It means we’re the same,” Peter said. He walked her toward the window that looked over the park. “We’re good together.”
She leaned into him, offered him all her weight. Peter kissed her on the mouth. He started to pull off her clothes. Sometimes they would go to the bed right away, but sometimes he wouldn’t let her touch him. He would remove her clothes slowly and stare and say things under his breath like, “Oh,” and “Oh, God.”
Other times, she would enter the apartment and find Peter staring off into space with this blank look on his face, and when she approached him, he would brighten; he wouldn’t take his eyes off her. He wound his arms around her tightly as they slept. She tried to ask him questions. But Peter didn’t like to talk about himself. She’d asked him how his brother died:
“An overdose of something,” he’d said. “A little of this and a little of that.”
“On purpose, you mean?”
“Well that’s not the way it was explained to me at six, but yeah, on purpose. That’s one way of saying it.”
She’d asked him how long he’d lived in Iowa.
“Oh, a while,” he’d said. “Too long.”
Sheila walked to the other side of the apartment and poured herself a glass of water. The front room was large, but there were several small holes in the front window, the size of bullets.
“The neighborhood did not used to be so good as it is now,” Iva had cautioned.
There were rats in the alleys, with long pink tails. Of course, they only wanted to eat. Everyone’s garbage was heaped together in piles behind the apartment; who knew what one could find. The city of Chicago had put up signs in the alleys that said: TARGET, RATS! with a crude illustration of a rat electrocuted by a bolt of lightning. Did it mean that traps were set? Or that tenants should consider setting such traps? The eyes of the rat in the illustration were exaggeratedly frozen, as if in shock, and it made Sheila wonder where all these rodents had come from, how all these animals had found their way to the city in the first place.
Her coyote in Macbride Hall had likely never lived in Iowa like most of the animals there; it was either shot upon arrival in the Midwest, or it was a gift from scientists in Nevada or California. It stared straight forward. Maybe they didn’t know how to arrange it, the limbs and everything. In the case at Macbride Hall, the coyote kept so still. None of its natural prey and predators were around; there was nothing to chase, nothing to run from. It was difficult to know one’s own body, surviving in a place outside of the natural, predetermined one. There was nothing obvious about what to fear; there was no expectation about what to desire.
In the bathroom that she shared with Peter, his razor sat on the shelf beside her soap and what her mother would call her feminine hygiene products. She remembered her mother encouraging her to wrap up the used applicators in toilet paper before throwing them in the bathroom trashcan. “Men don’t want to see that kind of thing,” she’d advised. As if there were a constant stream of strange men visiting the house rifling through the garbage for evidence of Sheila’s period! Now that she was actually living with a strange man—or anyway, the only man she’d ever lived with save her father—she took comfort in the sight of their bodies’ overlap: stray strands of her hair stuck to his bar of soap in the shower, his used condoms mingling with her tampon packaging in the trash. The box of tampons boasted in three languages about the everyday importance of enjoying being woman, Être une femme, c’est formidable … tous les jours!
Sitting on the toilet, she smiled into her thighs.
One night as they were lying in bed, a woman on the street was yelling up to one of the apartments nearby, “An accident, you Don Juan asshole? Is that right? I’ll show you accident!” Sheila heard glass, presumably a windshield, shattering. She heard a man shouting in a language she didn’t understand. She heard sirens.
Peter wound his arms tightly around her in the bed like he wanted her to know she was safe.
“You and your boyfriend maybe sho
uld be more quiet,” Iva advised one day as they knelt on the floor of a kitchen, scrubbing side by side.
“Quiet how?” Sheila asked.
“Mmm,” Iva mimicked, “Oh, oh, oh.”
Sheila smiled and stuck up her middle finger, and then she went to squeeze her rag out in the laundry room sink. Iva followed. She put her head on Sheila’s shoulder as if to rest for a moment. “A joke,” she said quietly, in truce, in apology. “I know you have not many of them in this country, but it is only this.”
“At least I’m getting some,” Sheila said.
“Some what?” said Iva.
“It’s an expression,” said Sheila.
“What are you getting? Some sex? Yes, it is obvious because you are very loud.”
Sheila laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “You mentioned.”
Iva said, “I can say, ‘I am getting some,’ and it means I am getting some sex.”
“Also,” Sheila said, “you could ask, ‘Are you getting any?’”
“And it means the same?” Iva looked at her as if incredulous that such innocuous words could become so loaded in context. Sheila recognized this feeling from French. Put an accent mark in a different place or switch two letters around and you could think you were talking about vegetables when in fact you were talking about genitalia.
“Have you been with a lot of guys?” Sheila asked.
Iva began to count off on her fingers. She didn’t get very far before she held her hands up, but it was still enough that she had to pause to count them.
“I’ve only ever been with Peter,” Sheila admitted.
Iva smiled, “Yes, I know.”
Both women squeezed their rags and went back to their knees in the kitchen.
“I am pleased for you,” Iva said from the other side of the dishwasher. “And the next time I get some, I will be sure you hear me get some.”
Sheila smiled into her sponge, “C’est formidable, mon ami.” At first, she couldn’t put her finger on what set her so much at ease being around Iva, until she remembered that it had been a long time since she had someone she might refer to as her friend. She thought of Anthony then, of the friend he had been to her in those first weeks of sharing their lunches in the Large Caf. She pictured him sitting alone now at their lunch table. His eyes looked the same way they had when he walked away from her after she’d kissed him. She wished there had been some way to apologize to him. She wondered if he had asked another girl to the dance. She wondered if the girl had said yes.